Byrne spent 10 years in Eugene, nine as athletic director, dragging the Ducks out of mediocrity.

“I still love the Ducks,” said Byrne, who has been Texas A&M’s athletic director since 2002. “I TiVo their games. I’m so proud of them for what they’ve done. I can’t imagine the progress they’ve made.”

Byrne came in on the ground floor in 1983 as UO athletic director Rick Bay’s top assistant. The next year, Bay was gone and Byrne was running the athletic department.

That was before the Casanova Center, the athletic department’s home that is named for former UO coach Len Casanova.

Byrne worked out of a small office in ancient McArthur Court, on the other side of the Willamette River, and faced a monumental job.

“We had to do something if we were going to get better,” said Dan Williams, then Oregon’s vice-president for administration and Byrne’s boss. “The Los Angeles schools were talking about dealing us out of the league. We came to the conclusion we had good coaches, but we didn’t have the athletes. And the reason we didn’t have the athletes was because we didn’t have the facilities.”

It was a hard sell, because even some administrators in Byrne’s own department didn’t see the need.

“Change is always difficult,” said Byrne, who heard more than once, “we didn’t need that to go to the Rose Bowl in 1958. Cas didn’t need that.”

Byrne wanted the Ducks to invest in their infrastructure – improve the football stadium, create adequate office space, give his football coaches a place to meet and to entertain, and the players a locker room designed for two-platoon football.

When Byrne took charge, the UO football team either practiced in Autzen Stadium on a worn artificial surface, or looked for a vacant intramural field.

Former UO coach Rich Brooks said everything began to change “when Bill Byrne came in and started investing in the program. He had a lot of innovative ways to add money and get some football facilities.”

Byrne started by convincing local grass seed farmers to pitch in and help create a place for the Ducks to practice across the street from Autzen.

“We finally had a real practice field,” Brooks said.

Byrne tells the story of being embarrassed by the paint job in McArthur Court. There was no money in the budget to do the job, so Byrne and his assistants tackled it themselves. Even Byrne’s son Greg, now athletic director at Arizona, was given a brush and put to work.

Byrne pushed a plan to dome Autzen. When that failed, he got behind an initiative petition to place a one-cent tax on beer and cigarettes to support the athletic departments of Oregon’s public universities. That failed too, but Byrne was indefatigable.

Finally, he helped push through a NFL parlay game into the Oregon Lottery to help subsidize intercollegiate athletics.

Nothing helped raise Oregon’s national profile more than the Ducks’ 1989 appearance in the Independence Bowl, their first trip to the postseason since 1963.

At that time, the Pacific-10 Conference didn’t have the many bowl tie-ins that it does now.

Oregon was 7-4 that season, but the bowl committees were leery because nobody was certain that enough UO fans would buy tickets and travel to the bowl site for the game.

Byrne outbid Kentucky for a slot opposite Tulsa in the Independence Bowl anyway, guaranteeing that the athletic department would purchase enough tickets to satisfy the committee. Oregon then had to resell the tickets to fans interested in seeing the game.

“We had to buy 11,000 or 12,000 tickets,” Byrne said. “But we had to do that to show the bowls that we were capable of having fans follow us. I used the quote then that, before you can go after the brass ring, you need to get on the merry-go-around. That got us on the merry-go-around.”

The Ducks beat Tulsa 27-24, and UO fans swamped Shreveport.

“It was a big gamble,” Williams said. “It was classic risk and reward. We took the risk and got the reward.”

It probably helped Byrne kick-start a building boom. He added sky suites on the north side of Autzen and began construction of the Cas Center.

It was the beginning of a massive retooling of Oregon’s athletic facilities that continued under Bill Moos and Pat Kilkenny, and hasn’t stopped. The Ducks improved the Cas Center, expanded Autzen, added the Moshofsky Indoor practice facility, put in grass practice fields on the west end of Autzen, built PK Park on the east end and improved Hayward Field, the track stadium.

The swank Jaqua Center for Student Athletes opened last year. Matthew Knight Arena, the glitzy, new home of Oregon basketball, opens this week. A new, six-story, 130,000-foot, football-only facility is on the drawing board.

Byrne left to become Nebraska athletic director in 1992. He has watched with pride from a distance as the seed he planted flourished.

When the Ducks reach for the brass ring on Monday might, Byrne will be parked in front his big screen television in College Station, Texas. He won’t watch quietly.

Said Byrne with a smile that could be heard over the telephone, “I’ll be yelling for the Ducks.”